His Beer-o Is Gone

Yeah, I know, that's the worst pun title I've come up with yet, but fuck it, I'm sure there are undoubtedly many worse ones to come.

Payday, boredom, and a complete lack of social life are a dangerous combination when you have idle hands. So with no alternative plans for friday night other than staring at the walls, I decided to... stare at them drunk instead. Awesome.

My initial plan was to try and get four different pils beers, but I could only find three in my shitty local supermarket, so I rounded it up with an ale, I think, purely based on the fact it was called Berserker-something-or-other. Metal as fuck.

The Holsten was bought based on a stunning recommendation ("it's one of the slightly less shitty German pils beers") but I could only get a 4 pack, so I guess I better like it!
I'll find out soon enough, seeing as it's first up.
Cracking open a can is something I rarely do with beer anymore, at least since my tastes, and drinking environment, have long since graduated from a shitty warm 4-pack of Budweiser swigged while huddled on a someone else's floor, so it's a little weird to see the froth bubble out of the top of the can and down the side. My first swig is a necessity more than enjoyment, to stop this stuff soaking me.
But that first swig? Not too bad. Not too bad at all.

Seeing as it's the first beer of the evening, and I'm taking the first pull about 10 minutes after I bought it, it's unchilled, so I don't really get any sense of refreshment out of it, but it's wet and I'm thirsty, so it does the trick. I'll stick the others in the fridge and try 'em later, see if it can rise above tolerable when chilled.

Next up is the Belgian Premium Pils. Now this one was given a while in the ol' cooler, so my first pull is teeth-tinglingly refreshing. This is a really fucking tiny bottle, so I get through it in about 10 minutes. That might also have something to do with the fact that it's a really light, crisp beer, one of the myriad brews I describe as 'real good, I could drink ten of 'em!'. Although anyone that knows me or has drank with me knows after about three beers I'm as many sheets to the wind.
That reputation we Scots have for being able to hold our booze? Yeah, well I'm the exception that proves the rule. But that doesn't mean I don't enjoy necking as many beers as I can until standing up becomes an issue. And these Premium Pils? I could drink ten of 'em.

Third of the evening is the big bastard bottle of Czech goodness, the Pilsner Urquell.
I'm a little intimidated by the size of this one. Also, the fact it's in a green bottle leaves me sceptical, but in the name of beer, I persevere (say that aloud, then compliment me on my hyming skillz, thanks)!
I'm glad I do. This is more like what I expect of a Pils, a really crisp fizziness, a tang, a kick, a little bitter, a little unpleasant at first, but after I get over the first impression, I warm up to it's cold goodness. There ain't a whole lot to say about it except that based on the fact it's Czech, and I plan on spending a whole lot of time over there next summer, that it bodes well for spending many nights (or days, if I'm feeling decadent/like a drunken loser) sipping on a few of these 500ml bad boys.
If I actually make it there, and you see me, come buy me a Pilsner Urquell or two at Obscene Extreme, Fluff Fest or Brutal Assault Fest. I'll be the lightweight Scotsman grinning madly at whatever grind-y goodness is on stage.

Do I have it in me to tackle the last beer, to get my Berserker on? Of fucking course I do. In thename of ...something. Reviewiness? Journalism? HA! Who am I kidding, no-one reads this shit except me when I proof-read it. And even then I do a shitty half-assed job of it. ANYWAY. BEER.
This is brewed a little closer to home, seeing as it's described as a Hebridean Pale Ale, so it'll be a welcome break from the pils-overload of the past couple of drinks.
The smell alone as I raise the bottle to my mouth is great, a rich, dark, sweet PUNGEANCE! I've no idea if thats a word, or if it is, if that's the correct spelling, but it covers what I want to say, so fuckit.

First gulp: URGH! Okay, I'm not even giving this another chance, that was actually fucking disgusting. Pale ale? It's like fucking rotten treacle! No. Not even drinking that out of morbid curiosity. Fucking foul.

Here's some sounds that tie in with the title, and are just as thick and foul as the last beer...
full credit to  KILLTHATCAT.COM for this footage

Devils On Horseback

This was probably the most impulsive meal I've made in a long time.

My work schedule doesn't leave a whole lot of time for cooking anything weird these days, but today was an exception, I finished while the supermarkets were still open!
During my usual end of day 'I have another 30 minutes before I can catch a train home' internet-browsing malaise, I stumbled upon an article about one of the few chefs whos career I actually follow, one Matthew Matheson, or as Cancer Bats fans may know him, Matty BSOD.
I'm just gonna save myself some typing and link to the article in question, which fills ya in on his impressive background, and gives a sneak preview of what I'd be making this evening.

So after reading that, and being intrigued enough to want to try it out myself, I thought fuck it, why not? Picked up the ingredients within an hour of first hearing of this dish, and got to work!

I was unable to track down the specific cheese mentioned in that article, but luckily they did suggest camembert or brie as a suitable substitute. I went for camembert, as for some reason I had it in my head that it would work better when melty, and brie was more of a cold cheese.
Fuck knows, I know next to nothing about food.
I did however manage to get the Medjool dates after much trawling of aisles, I almost punched the air (and a shop assistant) when I finally found them. I also splashed out a bit of cash on some pretty top notch bacon, because all the other streaky stuff looked like the shavings left on a slughterhouse floor.

So with it all assembled in a photogenic fashion, I got cutting! As you can pretty goddamn clearly see, you need to de-seed the dates yourself, yet leave them intact enough to be able to close like a casket around a particularly cheesey corpse.

Since I was making enough to feed two (HA! as if anyone else would ever eat my cooking), I de-seeded every date, and used half of my wheel of camembert to fill 'em.

Yes, actually, it WAS necessary to arrange them like that. It makes food taste better when you're a pretentious prick during the preparation, true fact. You can probably guess what comes next, but incase you're too fucking stupid, here's a pic anyways...

Yep, big shock, you stuff the dates with the camembert! Holy shit, I did not see that one coming.
Start a fire under a pan, and tear into your over-expensive pack of bacon. Give it a quick sizzle on each side, before removing it from the pan and rolling each streak around a cheesey date, pinning the whole messy thing together with a toothpick. When you have enough of 'em made, pop them in the oven at around gas mark 4 for a coupla minutes to melt the cheese and caramelise the sugar in the dates.
Remove, and serve with something slightly healthier than thick cheese entombed in pure sugar and shrouded in flayed pigflesh. In the spirit of hallowe'en, I went for a Spooky Satanic Salad.

Put it all together, and get ready to taste something that feels like a heart attack as you type up some bullshit about it an hour later.

Here's some weirdo music I've never heard that fits the post title. I can't be fucked finding references to horseback in music I love, and devils is too obvious. Enjoy, or don't, I give no fucks either way.

Ministry-one

Minimal preamble for once. I've never made soup before, and I fancied giving it a shot, so... I did.

Here's what went into it

First up, chop all your veg (celery, carrot, leek, red onion, chilli pepper). I'm not a fan of really chunky soups, so I diced it all pretty finely. Pre-heat a massive pot while you chop, then throw it all in there.

Give that a couple of minutes to reduce down a little, before opening up your tomato puree, and add a tbsp of that into your mix. Open up your tin of plum tomatoes, and chop them up finely by plunging some scissors into the can and snipping away at the innards, blood-red juices spattering your clothes.
Pour the full tin into your pot, and get stirring!

 

This is the point where you can decide to either keep your soup nice and vegetarian-friendly, and skip the 'dump in a tonne of animal parts' stage. But fuck that, I can't eat anything that doesn't have corpse in it. Fry up some bacon, a minestrone standard, cut it into tiny pieces before adding to your pot.

And since I recently returned from Barcelona, which was heaven for a spicey smoked sausage fiend like myself, I can't resist adding some chorizo to this already thick-as-fuck mix. So... do that, too.

Boil up some water to make a stock with. Ideally, if I'd had more time, I would have used a fresh chicken stock made with real chicken, buuut... I was hungry, and lazy, and I wanted to get this made as fast as possible. At the same time as your stock water is boiling, smash up some pasta into small pieces. I used my fists because I'm just cool like that, but probably best to just lightly smack it with a rolling pin while it's still in the bag to break it up, if you're not quite as angry at pasta as I am.

Pour in your chicken stock, shortly followed by adding your pasta, stir well, and leave to heat through for a further ten minutes. Once it's all thickened up nicely, either grate some fresh parmesan, or do what I did and cheat, using the (still fresh) pre-grated stuff. Chop some parsley into tiny pieces for garnishing purposes, and serve!

If this was 2004, I would have more to say about the band that coincides with my latest terrible pun title. I used to fucking love Ministry. Then shortly after I did, they came back all heavy-handed political messages and uninspired songs, so I swiftly fell out of love. Psalm 69 is still a terrifying, stomping, corroded banger of a record though. Those fucking robot-Bonham drums!

I DEMAND TO HAVE SOME BOOZE!

The first thing that attracted me to this particular brand of beers were the labels.

If you know anything about... well, anything, then you'll recognise those obscene scrawlings to be the work of the great Ralph Steadman. Most famous for his work with Hunter S. Thompson in illustrating his book Fear And Loathing in Las Vegas, Steadman has been one of my favourite illustrators for close to a decade now, ever since I saw this little beauty:

That illustration was included as a folded up poster with my dvd copy of Withnail and I.
Withnail and I, incase you are somehow insane/unaware of it's existence, is Bruce Robinson's paean to 1969, a counter-argument to the commonly held view of the '60s as being all sunshine, light, hope and peace.
I won't get into the movie TOO much, since I'd keep you reading for an hour if I did, but Withnail and I is often mistakenly seen as just an invitation to imitate it's elegantly wasted eponymous characters, reduced to a student drinking game in some circles.
True, it does contain a HEROIC amount of booze consumption and general drunken hilarity, but watch it 30+ times (I had a very boring adolescence) and you'll see so much more to it.



ANYWAY! That illustration, with it's scraped out lines, disgusting unidentified stain of a colour scheme and depiction of living in utter filth blew my tiny teenage mind. So the point is, I've always had a soft spot for Steadman.
So when I saw a collection of beers packaged in this awesome insanity, I didn't hesitate to try 'em!

The geniuses behind these beers are Flying Dog Ales, who I think are based out of Baltimore? If you want to know more, read up at their awesome site here http://flyingdogales.com/

I'll confess, this isn't the first encounter I've had with these beers, I'd actually sampled one of the varieties a few days previously after a trip into Peckham's Deli. When paying for the bottle I bought that day, the cashier got talking about the new arrivals to their stock, the unusual names, asking if I'd ever tried them before.
As I leave, she hollers after me "COME BACK IF YOU EVER WANT TO HAVE A RAGING BITCH!". Which is a weird thing for a girl to shout at you in public, especially when you're there with your girl.
Without any hint of innuendo, I took her up on that offer, and went back to buy as many of these beers as I could carry.

First of the evening is the, yep, you guessed it, Raging Bitch!
Usually when I open up a bottle, first thing I do is take a long, hard, Hannibal Lecter-esque sniff of it, and this one had a REALLY overpowering reek. I mean that in the nicest possible way. It was almost fruity, really quite a nice smell, so I was a little skeptical as I'm not really a huge fan of fruity beers.
Luckily, this was nothing of the sort, and upon the first swig it's true taste hit me like a sledgehammer. A very small, liquid sledgehammer.
It has a really strong, dry taste, or at least the first gulp did. My first thought? I don't really like this. I was gutted. I really hoped it would turn out like a lot of other beers, if I gave it a chance it might surprise me. So I persevered, in the name of science! Or just being a drunken git.

Swig after swig goes by, and it never QUITE hits the enjoyable stage. It has a taste, I'll give it that much, I just never really warmed to it.

Next I go for the Old Scratch, which is the bottle I tried previously.
It says on the bottle this is a lager, so I take the first sniff n' swig combo thinking I know exactly what I'm gonna get from this. It's everything I expected and... less? I don't know if it's the fact I'm drinking it after a VERY overpowering-tasting beer, or if it's just a very smooth lager, but this doesn't really pack a punch at all! Two disappointments in a row? Nooooo!

I wonder if it's one of those beers that goes really well when you're stuffing your face with a gigantic pepperoni pizza? I endeavoured to find out. Turns out it is! Probably doesn't need to be QUITE so specific in your choice of accompaniment, but this was a real tasty, smooth lager to take a gulp of after a few famished bites. I'd definitely have this again, just without any overly-high expectations.

With two beers down, and a pizza devoured, I'm more than ready to take on their classic pale ale, the eponymous Flying Dog.
Now THAT'S more fucking like it! The second it hits my tongue, there's a good frothy texture, genuinely delicious taste, and I think I've finally found my weapon of choice.
It's not a sour taste, but it definitely has a real robust bite to it, nice n' zesty, but still goes down smooth. I'm getting through it pretty quickly by this point, maybe slightly influenced by the fact I've actually decided to leave the house for once and go for a coupla drinks out there, in the... OUTSIDE WORLD!

I blame the two beers I've consumed before the invitation arose for my foolish decision to go out. Anyone who knows me (or has read any of my other terrible so-called 'reviews') knows that I cannot handle my beer. The myth that the Scots all have ironclad stomachs and can drink anyone under the table? I'm the exception that proves the rule. Give me a bottle of whisky and I'm fine, I'll sit quite content, slugging through it for hours. But give me more than 3 beers in the space of an hour? I'm useless.

So with that moment of self awareness and deprecation, I'm off out to the pub!

postscript: I managed to work my way through a further 3 bottles of Newcastle Brown and a couple of Jameson that night before wandering home and falling asleep fully clothed. I'm a real class act.

Cinnabourbodons

So I've been talking about making something along these lines for a year now, and I finally found myself bored outta my skull enough to finally do it.

I haven't baked a cake since I was about 13 years old, so I didn't go into this filled with confidence at how it would turn out. Especially not since my ingredients were... a little unusual.

Yeah, the name is basically a drunkenly assembled portmanteau combining three things I fucking LOVE: cinnamon, bourbon, and Mastodon. Since I couldn't get a hold of any of Brent Hinds' every-drug-under-the-sun-infused blood (I suck at being a stalker), the first two alone will have to suffice.

So first up, seperate out your various measures of ingredients:
• 5oz self-raising flour
• 4oz caster sugar
• Stork margarine
• 2 eggs
• 2 large tbsps of cocoa powder
• Cinnamon (add to taste)
• A very, VERY generous splash of bourbon. I went for Southern Comfort, the wimpiest, but sweetest, brand I know.

So firstly, grab a pyrex bowl, pour in all your dry powder ingredients first, then add your margarine, then your eggs. Grab a whisk (I'd recommend electric, because I'm a lazy motherfucker, and you're guaranteed a better consistency with a little high-powered assistance), and bury it right deep in there, and start mixing!

Once it's mixed together pretty well, you can start splashing in some bourbon 'til you get the correct texture. I don't really know what that is, not being a cake/bake expert, so I just kinda played it by ear. Or sight. Or taste. Whateverthefuck sense is applicable here.

Add some extra sugar, bourbon, and a liberal sprinkling of cinnamon, all to taste.

[Insert photo of finished, whisked product here. Or don't, if you're an idiot who forgot to take one.]

Divide your mixture up between several cake... things. What are they called? The wee paper... skirts.
Cake skirts.
Fuckit, that'll have to do.
Anyway, divide it up between a lot of 'em, or just a couple, depending on how big you want the finished product to be. I went for big-ass-motherfuckers, as I believe is the correct industry term.

Once thats done, pop them into a pre-heated oven (gas mark 3) for between 15 - 20 minutes.
If you're feeling particularly limber, try and air-drum to anything from Blood Mountain. I pulled every single muscle in my arms doing so.



Once the time has passed, take 'em out of the oven and poke one with your finger. If it raises pretty quick, they're done. If it stays poked, then they're either not quite baked, or you've added FAR too much bourbon.
Guess which I fell victim to?

So now that your cakes are ruined, it's time to make the icing.

I didn't realise how fucking annoying it was to whip up some simple chocolate icing! Goddamn!
Dump your butter into the dry ingredients, and basically just... fuck around with a fork trying in vain to integrate the ingredients. Eventually lose the rag with it and say "fuck this!", storm off in a huff for 15 minutes, then grudgingly return and have another shot.

If you're still completely inept, boil up a tiny amount of water, and splash that in there, to help break up the chunks of sugary butter, and continue whisking it into something resembling dog shit.

It tastes marginally better than it looks.

Spread it out over your terrible cakes, and attempt to make it at least halfway presentable by swirling the icing around to little points. God they look awful, don't they? Sprinkle a little cinnamon over the finished products, and try to muster up some faux-enthusiasm at the prospect of eating all of them by yourself...

Börek Too Late

I know, I know, that's an awful title, but it gives me an excuse to listen to Saint Vitus as I type this, so fuckit, it'll do.

Anyway, this will be a super-quick post because this is a super-quick snack.

Although I originally intended for this to be part of a wider range of BBQ snacks, but since no-one ever wants to hang out, grill meat and neck beers with me, I still made enough to serve about 6 people and ate them all myself.

First off, gather your VERY minimal ingredients. When I last ate this, it was made with either just feta cheese, or also using sucuk, a type of Turkish sausage. Since central Scotland isn't exactly known for it's rich Turkish culture, I couldn't get a hold of any sucuk, so substituted it for some chorizo.

Before you do ANYTHING else, turn your oven to gas mark 5, and place your chorizo in a covered dish, and let it sit in there for around 15 minutes. Next up, up dice your feta into small manageable chunks. Such a minimal amount of effort really shouldn't justify a picture, but...

Another ingredient I had to substitute is the standard filo pastry used in borëk, for the much more readily available puff pastry. No major difference, really. Anyway, lay your pastry out on some flour-covered film, and roll it as thin and flat as possible. Cut into sections about the width of a credit card.

Once your chorizo has been in the oven for it's allotted 15 minutes, remove from the dish and dice into (incredibly oily, messy) chunks. And try not to eat about half of it as you do so. I fucking love chorizo. Fun to eat, fun to say. Chorizo, chorizo, chorizo!

Anyhow... load up your chorizo and feta onto half of your pastry bases, making sure to keep the filling away from the edges, and use the other half to cover the filling, pinching the edges of both parts of your pastry to form little delicious parcels. Baste these with one single whisked egg to seal them, and glaze them with a thin layer of the egg to give them a good golden glow once they're cooked.

Lay them out on a baking tray, and pop them in the oven for around 15 minutes, turning occasionally to make sure they don't burn.

And that's pretty much it! Half an hour and you have a pretty decent portion of delicious snacks that can be kept refrigerated for days, eaten hot or cold.
I recommend hot, the gooey melted feta is just tooooo fuckin' good!

Raider of the Lost Beer Reviews

This 'review' is taken from a stained and torn scrap of paper I just found amidst the clutter of unanswered letters, receipts, magazine cuttings, hastily scribbled dream recollections and unfinished sketches that currently occupies my desk.

 I found the photo of the beers it relates to, it's a couple of months old now, but I figure I may as well type it up out of boredom more than anything else. It's more or less a direct transcription of what is scribbled above, with any added recollections I may have, and updated opinions on the beers I've tried again since then.

First up, if I can recall (and going by the neatness of the handwriting before it descended into a drunken scrawl) was the Paradox.
I've tried just about every Brew Dog beer I can get my hands on, and they're all interesting in their own way, but the Paradox is one I have craved a few more times since this initial test.

I could give a run-down of what makes this beer so interesting, the way it's brewed and whatnot, but they say it better than I ever could, and with a better site design HERE, so all I can give is my own opinion of this delicious, strong-as-fuck brewed-in-whisky-casks beauty of a beer.

My scribbled notes tell me I thought it had a real strong first impression, but not necessarily in a good way. Thank fuck I got over that, because the more you drink of it, the more adjusted to the overpowering taste you become, and you can really settle in and enjoy it. I wouldn't say the whisky taste is OBVIOUSLY whisky, but it definitely lends something to the flavour, which after trying 2 or 3 bottles since, I evidently still can't figure out. It seems to be out of production, so it might be kind of hard to track down another bottle in an attempt to come up with a comparison. It was good though.

Next up (possibly) was the London Porter.
I didn't hold out a lot of hope for it, because I'm a total design snob and the fact that it was a Sainsbury's own brand beer, I thought it would be horribly generic mass-produced swill. On first sip, oh how wrong I was!

The label describes it as having a rich, dark chocolate flavour, with a hint of spicey liquorice, which I thought sounded awesome, except for the liquorice aspect because that stuff is sheer processed gelatinous cancer tissue, and if you eat it, we can't be friends. Anyway, back to the beer... When I tried it, that was exactly how I would decribe it too. It reminded me of heavy stout, in the texture at least, it had a really thick, almost syrup-y consistency, like a thicker Guinness or something.
Basically, it was heavy as fuck, pretty hard going to drink, but so worth it for that tangy, dark sweetness.

Next up was the Black Sheep, which I seem to remember drinking outdoors, while reading a book, and it being unrefridgerated before I started it. I think maybe my judgement of it would be clouded by the warmth, and it says that in my drunken notes. I thought it had a real dry taste, and the label itself described it as having a 'dry, refreshing bitterness'. Like most beers, after the initial adjustment to the taste, it started going down pretty smooth, and I definitely enjoyed it, but then, there's very little I enjoy more than lying outdoors in the sun with a book and a beer.

Last up was the Warsteiner, which I remember drinking with a meal that same day, so maybe the food I ate affected my feelings about this beer.
I remember buying it because it's surprisingly difficult to get a hold of ANY German beer over here, never mind one that a certain German won't decry as being 'shitty Bavarian bullshit!', so I was hoping that this one might meet with her approval, as well as my own. So upon seeing the only German bottle in the supermarket that WASN'T Becks, I was pretty excited to try it.

The first thing that hit me, which I've noted down in almost indescipherable handwriting by this point, is that it has quite a strong smell, pungent, very gassy. I remember it being quite dry, and having an almost meaty flavour, like a smokeyness to it, but again, that might just be the fact I was having it with dinner. It got to be pretty tough going to finish it by the end, but I was 4 bottles into the day by that point so my stamina was waning a little. I'll definitely pick up another bottle sometime to give it a fairer chance.

Going back to my notes, I've also written 'BIG ASS' which I'm assuming refers to the size of the bottle and not MC Hammer lyrics. 'Goes well with biscuits' is another gem.
I'm pretty sure I am the least qualified, least professional beer reviewer in the world if that was all I could think to say!

That's not going to stop me from reviewing almost every new beer I can find. Til next time...

Rouladen-ial Of Life

I had waited to try this meal for what seemed like forever, ever since I first saw this amazing creation, so when I fiiinally made it over to Germany 3 weeks ago to spend a week with the awesome girl who first told me about it, that was one of the first things we did.
I think we started preparing this meal around 10pm or something ridiculous, which considering it takes around 3 hours to cook, including prep time, was semi-retarded. When I finally got around to eating it, it was a totally sacrilicious experience.

Even though I would unfortunately be making it alone this time, I didn't change a thing about the recipe or the process, since it turned out so goddamn incredible first time around. My only concern was finding decent quality thinly sliced beef, since it's not something that I'd ever used before, and didn't know a whole lot about.
Luckily my local butcher had a pretty incredible selection, and the wee girl of about 13 behind the counter knew exactly what I wanted from my less than eloquent description "uhhhh, it's like a thin steak, but with no fat, and it's real big, like... an A3 sheet of paper?" "ummm, you mean beef ham?". BEEF HAM! Amazing name for it, considering it has fuck all to do with ham. Good ol' retarded Scotland.

Anyway, here's all the stuff you need...

First step would be to dice both your onion and your cornichons, then fry them for a coupla minutes without burning them.

Next up is the fun part! For some reason I can't remember, you need to smash the meat flat, so lay down a big piece of greaseproof paper and sit your beef on top of it. Cover with another piece of greaseproof paper, then take a pot or pan, and start battering the hell out of it.
This is yet another one of those moments where I might come across as mildly psychotic, as I kinda enjoyed the feeling of repeatedly slamming the pan down and seeing the blood spatter out of the lifeless tissue. Mmmurderous.

Top the meat with a LIGHT sprinkling of chilli powder and herbs, you dont wan;t anything to overpower the taste of your filling.

Speaking of the filling, the carnivore in me enjoys the hell outta the fact this dish is basically wrapping meat inside another kind of meat: bacon cubes!
First, spread a tablespoon of mustard on each piece of meat, getting really even, but not too thick, coverage. Next take your bacon cubes and sprinkle a handful on each mustard-coated beef section, and then grab a handful of your fried onions and cornichons and do the same.
Spread them out evenly across the meat, but not too close to edge so they don't fall out when you roll 'em up.

Next you... well, roll them up, basically. No fuckin' shit, right?
Once they're rolled into delicious beef parcels, cut about... say a metre of thread (I'd prefer to have something thicker, twine or whatever, but I don't have any), and wind it around the rouladen several times, then tie a series of overly complex knots (which any good serial killer should already know) to bind them tightly.

This is the last stage before you have nothing to do for a coupla hours. Fire up your frying pan, and lower your delicious meat parcels into the frying pan like Norman Bates disposing of Marion Crane's body in the trunk of her car.

Give them around 5 minutes, just to brown the outside and seal them.

To continue the metaphor, you then push the wrapped victims into water, but best not to use swamp water like Bates, a pot of standard boiling water will do. Cover the top, and leave for around 2 hours, checking on them occaisionally.

While you wait, check out the song that inspired the latest awful metal-tastic pun post title.



Even if you're not much of a death metal aficionado, you cannot deny the power of THAT riff that first rears it's monstrously catchy head around 0:49. The legendary late Chuck Schuldiner is one of the inventors and innovaters of death metal, and with riffs like that, no wonder he's still considered one of the greats. RIP Chuck.

Anyway, where were we? Oh yeah, it's two hours later, because you've sat mesmerised by that riff and played the song a further 23 times.

When we made this meal in Germany, it was served with a whole bunch of sides, including plums in their deliciously syrupy juice. Unfortunately, I'm kinda weird and just don't get the appeal of having sweet things in a main meal (sorry Steff!), so I decided to skip that side dish.

However, there were these awesome ready-made dumpling things, which I later learned I could make using suet. When your rouladen have around 30 minutes left in the pot, fill a bowl with 100g self-raising flour, a pinch of salt, and around 50g shredded suet. Whisk this into a thick, doughy mixture using around 5 tbsps of water, and all your flour and suet has been absorbed into the mixture. Place the dough onto more greaseproof paper, dust your hands with flour before dividing the dough into 8 individual balls.

Drop these into your pot along with your rouladen, cover again, and leave for around 20 minutes.

When your 20 minutes are up, uncover your pot and the dough balls should have expanded out a helluva lot, and absorbed some of that incredible meat stock. Remove your rouladen, place them on a tray, then remove the dumplings with a slotted spoon, and place them on the same tray, and pop it in a pre-heated oven for 5 minutes.

During these 5 minutes, you can prepare your gravy. As I'm sure I've mentioned before, I like my gravy like I like my music; thick, black and sludgey. The amazing juices from your meat should have given you a pretty heady beef stock to work with, but it was still nowhere near thick enough for my liking.
Mix up a decent amount of Bisto gravy, using 4 heaped tsps and hardly any water, so it's thick as fuck. Add it into your beef stock, stirring the whole time, until it thickens up. Skim off the oily fat, and pour the remaining goodness into a gravy boat.

Remove your rouladen and dumplings from the oven, and serve! Then annoy the hell out of whoever you made it for by spending 5 minutes taking a million photos of their dinner...

I gotta say, these turned out incredibly! Admittedly, I was a little surprised that they did seeing as I was flying solo this time, and I didnt really have the benefit of a genuine German carniwhore to make sure I didn't completely fuck it up.

I guess I'll just have to cook 'em for her again to see if I did good, right?

Kuma's Corner

If you're as much of a burger fanatic as I am, with an added obsession for all things heavy, who also spends far too much time on the internet, you'll no doubt have already heard of this mecca: Kuma's Corner.

picture taken from http://dawchicago.wordpress.com/

Kuma's is a bar and burger joint in Chicago, established in 2005, which I've had the most insane desire to visit since I first learned of it's existence a couple of years back. They have a great selection of both bottle and draft beers, mainly of the American craft beer variety, as well as a tiny kitchen which has a worldwide rep for cranking out the tastiest, most adventurous burgers you'll ever eat. They also blast metal constantly, the rules on their site on their site stating 'NO REQUESTS!'.
Yeah, it pretty much sounds like heaven.

Anyway, it's pretty much the only thing that could drag me all the way over to Chicago, and since I don't see that happening any time soon, I'm destined to live Kuma-less for the foreseeable future.

So I decided I'd take a little 'artistic inspiration' from their burger list, and create my own (no doubt inferior) versions of their burgs!

Here's the ingredients I picked up to create these monsters:

Incase some of those aren't immediately obvious, there's some chipotle sauce (which I have been trying to find in this country for what seems like forever!), BBQ sauce, a fresh salami, Swiss Emmental cheese, a big wedge of Gouda cheese, a clove of garlic, streaky bacon, and 500g of minced beef.

Kuma's uses pretzel rolls for their burgers, but since those aren't readily available here, and I was too goddamn tired and lazy to try making them from scratch, I settled on a freshly baked poppyseed roll and a couple of sesame bagels.

First step in creating the four different types of burgers is.... to create four different burger patties! No fuckin' duh, right?

This is where things branch off. I figured that since I would kill to try pretty much every burger on Kuma's menu, I should make as many of 'em as I could in one night!
I decided on making my own attempts at the YOB, Clutch, Mastodon and Goatwhore burgers.
The full menu can be found here http://www.kumascorner.com/food


YOB

To make the YOB burg, Kuma's uses

• Smoked Gouda
• Bacon
• Roasted red peppers
• Roasted garlic mayo

Chop your red pepper into strips rather than chunks, cut a pretty large chunk of gouda, and finely dice a single garlic clove to use in your mayonaisse.

So first step with this one was to fire the burger under the grill. I'm not used to cooking burgers in a non-barbeque context, so I was a little hesitant about grilling them indoors, not knowing how much time each patty might take, especially not since I'd made them about twice the size of my normal burgers.

Next I oiled up my frying pan, and threw in a coupla strips of streaked bacon, as well as my strips of pepper. Give it around 5 minutes to crisp up the bacon, then throw your diced garlic into a small corner (in a circular frying pan, yeah, I know) just to lightly brown it before mixing it into a paste in your mayo.

I checked on my burgs at this point and they were cooking much faster and much more evenly than I had expected for a grill, so I quickly cut a bagel in half and stuck it in the toaster. Once that popped, you basically just tower all the ingredients on top of one another, like so!

Admittedly, YOB aren't a band I've been into for long, I only got around to checking them out after hearing one of my favourite bands of recent times, Dark Castle, would be playing shows with them in the US. The limited amount of stuff I heard confirmed that this would be an ass-kicking tour that I will never see. So yeah, check out YOB, then check out Dark Castle too, for good measure.




CLUTCH

I was actually a little hesitant about making this, as Kuma's recipe calls for

• Cheddar
• Swiss
• Jack (which I assumed meant pepperjack)
• Smoked Gouda

Yep, that's FOUR cheeses right there. Given that one of my most hated foods in the world is four-cheese pizza (just WHY?! that's too much cheese, it's just dumb, fuck off with your four cheese pizza), I knew there was no way in hell I was making this with all four. There was the added factor that pepperjack cheese is nigh on impossible to find in my part of the world.

So I took a liberty with the 'Jack' aspect of the recipe and convinced myself they meant Daniels. Then I remembered I hate Jack Daniels, and opted to marinade my burger patty in the VASTLY superior Jim Beam.

This one is relatively simple in terms of prep work: marinade your patty in a liberal dose of Jim Beam for as long as it takes for you to chop slices of gouda, cheddar and swiss cheese, then fire your bourbon-y burger under the grill, and once it's cooked, stack it with cheese. Et voila!

The taste of this one was... a little strong for my liking. The Jim Beam marinade didnt really do a whole lot for the burger, it seemed to almost cancel out all the herbs and spices I added in to my minced meat, so it was a pretty bland patty, topped with 3 VERY domineering cheese flavours, all fighting for supremacy over my tastebuds. Overall taste was somehow simultaneously overwhelming AND underwhelming. Oh well, two more burgs to go!

Before that though, here's some vintage Clutch, one of my all-time favourite bands.



"Brown sugar, sweet potato
Sourmash, baby back
Redneck romance
Bless my soul!"


MASTODON

I was looking forward to trying this one as it involves BBQ sauce, something that I don't get to use anywhere NEAR as much as I'd like to.

Kuma's sez...

• BBQ Sauce
• Cheddar
• Bacon
• Frizzled onions

This is the closest to the type of burger that I usually make, so I was pretty confident I would be into it, there's no 'risky' ingredients or anything, just tried and true burger mainstays! I did however decide to marinade the patty in the BBQ sauce, rather than just cover the whole thing in a big dollop of it once it was cooked.

Burger: grill. Bacon: frying pan. Likewise for your onions. Once all of it is cooked, put it together. Easy as that.

This one went exactly as I expected: tasty as hell! The onions turned out slightly sweet, counterpointing the SERIOUSLY salty bacon. Also, the BBQ-marinaded patty was so juicy and just goddamn delicious. I would recommend this burger the most out of all the ones I made.

Major label record companies suck, we all know this, so as a result of them not wanting anyone to hear their artist's music, I can't embed my favourite Mastodon track....

I can however post a pretty excellent quality LIVE version! That guitar... hotdamn!




GOATWHORE

Last up, and yeah, least, is the Goatwhore burger.
This one didn't really get a fair shot, because after eating the other three GIGANTIC burgers and working my way through a couple of Sol beers as I cooked, I was way too full to eat this.
I promise I'll give it another shot, and give it the attention it no doubt deserves.

Kuma's ingredients for this surprisingly include to goat's cheese...

• Fried salami
• Provolone
• Giardiniera salad

For starters, provolone is IMPOSSIBLE to find in central Scotland. At least in all my usual deli haunts and the two major supermarket chains that I tried to find it in. So that was stricken from the list. Also, I wasn't ENTIRELY sure what a giardiniera salad actually was, it seemed to involved a whole lot of olives, and pickled cauliflower...? Either way, that was off too. I at least followed the 'salad' part and bought a few fresh leaves of lettuce.

So yeah, this one was super quick since all I had to do was lightly fry the salami and place it on top of the burger. Pretty boring, really.

Like I said, i really didn't give this one it's due, and couldn't even finish it when it sat there oh-so-pretty on my plate. I packed it up in tupperware, took it to work the next day and ate it cold for breakfast. Urgh. Not recommended.

Goatwhore are Celtic Frost-worshipping blackened thrash from the murky South, featuring guitarist Sammy Duet, who played in the phenomenal Acid Bath.



This blog was far from chronological, I actually prepared all four of these at the same time, and the insanity involved in trying to seperate the right ingredients to go with the relevant burger, shoot pics of before-and-after ingredients, and then find time to actually EAT the fuckers... goddamn, that was a frantic meal! All respect in the world to the chefs who actually prepare burgs all damn day in Kuma's.
Hopefully one day I'll make it for to Chicago and try the genuine article.